It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the department of social development — or, as we like to call it, the department of antisocial obstruction — this week was able to boast of a defunct website, to go with its impressively long and growing list of scandals.
Yet the fact that its portal was down on Tuesday was all the more embarrassing given that it has forked out R1.4m since October 2025 for an external company to write its in-house media releases. Perhaps the website tender is still in the works?
It’s not clear why these straightforward media functions couldn’t be performed by communications head Sandy Godlwana, who was brought in nearly a year ago because the department was “under siege” from the media, parliament was told last week. And instead of implementing some smart crisis comms to deflect from the antics of now-deposed minister Sisisi Tolashe, Godlwana has managed to attract unflattering scrutiny of her own by racking up a hotel bill of some R600,000 in the pursuit of her media duties.
Perhaps this is simply endemic behaviour for a department that has been helmed by the likes of Bathabile Dlamini, a minister who almost cost millions of South Africans their social grants through a botched tender back in 2017, and which happens to be the new cabinet home to morals dynamo Dina Pule. Which is fine, we suppose, until you consider that the department’s mandate is a critical one: providing access to social grants and welfare for millions of poverty-stricken South Africans. That’s where the real siege is taking place.
